Achieving Adaptation in Medium Sized Cities: The Contribution of Urban Climate Transition Strategies in Increasing Soil Permeability [abstract]

It has been broadly demonstrated that soil sealing and land take have strongly impacted the contemporary city, leading to adverse phenomena such as loss of ecosystem services, urban heat island and flooding. The severe impacts on the city caused by increasingly frequent extreme or abnormal weather events can no longer be defined as “unpredictable”. These urban challenges call for specific mitigation and adaptation actions (Biesbroek et al., 2009) also because there is a growing awareness that climate change requires a substantial change in approaches to the urban and territorial transformations governance (Zucaro, Morosini 2018). Increasing soil permeability is considered an effective intervention against climate change and its effects. By restoring soil permeability, the ecosystem services provided by the soil are also partially restored, with benefits for the environment, human health and society as well (Bockarjova et al., 2022). This can be achieved through desealing interventions, i.e. restoring part of the soils to their previous state, recovering the main functions inhibited by transformative processes, through the removal of the waterproofed layers, the loosening of underlying soil and the removal of foreign material (EEA, 2013; Tobias et al., 2018). Over the past 30 years, desealing has begun to be recognized in the scientific literature and in spatial planning practice as a possible compensation and mitigation measure (Directorate General for Environment, 2012). The approaches to desealing known in literature and practice are essentially top-down, i.e. the result of political actions and choices by local governments, or bottom-up, i.e. promoted by associations and volunteers sensitive to the issue. Within this framework, the aim of this contribution is to investigate and compare some specific innovative strategic urban planning tools implemented specifically to guide climate change adaptation actions in northern Italian cities, specifically investigating the conditions, measures and processes related to depaving actions. This research will thus present the results of the comparison between the urban climate transition strategies of some medium-sized Italian cities, highlighting: • the tool specific goals and desired results; • the tool characteristics, by identifying its duration, promoters, funders and urban context; • characteristics of the urban context: geomorphological, hydraulic, soil, vegetation; • typologies of spaces interested by desealing actions, by previous use, ownership, size, state of use and conservation; • purposes of the desealing action, i.e. urban challenges or problems that the action aims to solve; • relations with ordinary spatial planning tools, i.e. urban plans and implementation plans; • methods of financing interventions. The expected results of the comparative analysis are to build a synthesis of some innovative experiences in the Italian context aimed at increasing the resilience of cities to climate change with a systematic approach, trying to investigate the different interpretation and application of the desealing concept. The outcomes of the study will be useful to investigate the criteria and processes underlying the choice of priority areas to be de-sealed and the physical interventions on the urban soils. It will also allow the development of a first critical reflection on the opportunities and limits of strategic plans for climate resilience, and their interactions with ordinary urban planning tools.